It Looks Like This is the End!: Thoughts on the Apocalypse

As you, my faithful, intelligent and sexually attractive readers are fully aware, I usually do not follow alarmist rhetoric. I am a natural doubter, sometimes doubting as many as fifty things before my morning coffee, and sometimes I don’t even believe that. I do not jump to conclusions easily.

There are more than a few wrestling matches from my high school days who’s outcomes I am still questioning and hope to overturn. And deep down, I still suspect that the real culprit in Murder on the Orient Express was Lee Harvey Oswald.

But in the months leading up to December, all this “Mayan Apocalypse” talk has begun to make a lot of sense. Events are happening that have been foreseen in holy texts from around the world: Hurricanes hitting New York City. Strange lights sighted over Mount Everest. Led Zeppelin reunited on Letterman, but don’t play any music. Also, I think those giant rocks crashing into my backyard are meteorites. Even if not, they’re still very large rocks.

All this doomsday talk has really put a damper on my creative output. After all, why spent the hours and hours of research, preparation, procrastination and then the final Jack Kerouac-style anxiety-filled keyboard-pounding writing process of writing this weekly column if all of my readers won’t be around tomorrow? I could spent today doing a number of things that are more rewarding: finding true love, spending time with people I care about, not writing this column.

Of course, to really understand the significance of the Mayan calender, we have to begin at the beginning. Living in what is today Mexico, the Mayans were an ancient civilization who’s technological breakthroughs confuse even today’s nerdiest scientists.

According to the most prominent theory, the Mayans didn’t construct their own calender at all. It was given to them as a gift by a time-traveling space alien named Krumlax, who visited the Mayans thousands of years ago and could be seen only by their king K’inich Janaab’ Pakal. Among the many inventions and innovations brought to the Mayans from beyond the stars were basketball, the concept of zero, and how to eat Oreo cookies with peanut butter.

Krumlax gave the Mayans the calender as a parting gift, before he returned to his home world. The Mayans, noticing that the calender ended on the ominous date of 12/21/12, asked the kindly sky-man what that meant. “It’s the end of the world,” he replied. As the Mayans proceeded to freak out, Krumlax calmly told them, “But, seriously, I wouldn’t worry about it, if I were you.”

“Sure, we will be gone by then, but our descendants…” They began.

“Trust me,” repeated Krumlax. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

If the world does end tomorrow, we had a pretty good run. Good, not great. Sure, we did a lot of things right: peanut butter cups, wasabi, The Beach Boys. And consider our propensity for progress. Within sixty years of discovering the secret of flight, we sent a manned space craft from the Earth to the Moon. And then we never went back because, unlike we assumed, it wasn’t swarming with extra terrestrial Space Babes who had never before experienced the touch of a man.

But there are just as many things that the Earth has never and (apparently) will never accomplish, if things go according to plan tomorrow. For example:

I never kept a dream journal.

We never produced a really great Looney Tunes movie.

Also, we still have tons of war and murder and pestilence and disease.

If the world does end tomorrow, then this, quite regretfully, would be my final column. So, like a great movie serial in the days of yore, this week’s column will end on a cliff-hanger, with our heroes strapped into a motorcycle, hurtling off into the unknown as the end credits invite us back for next week.

If the world does not end, tomorrow, then you can expect a new column next Thursday. Or maybe something a little bit more. Something grander. Maybe it’s time to actually consider what would happen if the world were to end tomorrow, and forge ahead into a new golden age of life on Earth, where people are kind to one another, where we truly realize the potential of each day, where we experience each moment of time as being unique and totally equally important to each moment that preceded it. Or whatever.